Reading Wednesday
Oct. 11th, 2017 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Girl from Rawblood by Catriona Ward. The Villarca family has lived in Rawblood, a great Gothic mansion isolated in the bogs and mists of Dartmoor, for generations untold. The Villarcas are also haunted by… something. Exactly what it is depends on which generation of the Villarcas you ask: the ghost of a murdered woman, a curse, a predisposition to madness with episodes brought on by strong emotions, an autoimmune disease, a tendency to sicken and pine if they move away from the house of Rawblood, a history of murdering those they love.
The story is told in segments from different slices of the family's history, though at every moment the characters think they are the last of the bloodline, not realizing the reader has already met their descendants. In 1910 we have Iris Villarca, a young girl living alone with her father and Tom Gilmore, the stableboy she is closer to than she should be. As she grows older a series of tragedies condemn her to an insane asylum, where she rots in the care of doctors more concerned with the larger devastation of World War I than with her. In 1881, Alonso Villarca is determined to solve his family’s problems through medical science, a goal that drives him to experiments involving vivisection, opium, blood, and a notable lack of ethics. In 1839, Mary Hopewell fades away from consumption in Italy, living on an independence that just barely keeps her above poverty. She doesn’t know, of course, that she will soon meet Don Villarca, who will marry her and buy back her long-lost childhood home of Rawblood. There are other narrators too: Meg (someday to become Iris’s mother but when we meet her enduring a childhood raised by strangers and believing herself to have the powers of a witch), Charles Danforth (Alonso’s companion in medical experiments, who sees the ghost Alonso swears isn’t there), Tom Gilmore’s letters from the trenches, and nameless Villarcas back into the dark depths of history, medieval monks and tattooed pagans. All of these stories interrupt and influence one another, circling around family secrets and unavoidable consequences and the connections across generations. The future and the past become indistinguishable, and by the end of the book time has circled back on itself.
For all the obvious horror tropes – a haunted house! a ghost! a witch! – I wouldn’t really call this a horror novel. It’s not particularly interested in scaring the reader. Instead, more than anything, it’s a tragedy. And a tragedy in quite the classical sense: you’re told right at the beginning how it’s all going to end painfully, and yet the characters keep making the choices you know they have to make, setting the plot on unbending tracks toward the inevitable crash. There’s a bit of a mystery in figuring out what exactly haunts the Villarcas, but the central pull of the book isn’t in solving those clues (though I do have to say that I absolutely love the ultimate reveal), but simply in the loss and sadness of their downfall, and Iris’s in particular. Her loneliness, her trauma, the way she is both abandoned to her fate and the creator of that same fate – ah, it’s great.
I absolutely loved this book. It has a very Victorian feel in some ways – the setting, the ruin of a noble house, the situations of the characters – but the author has set very modern eyes on these old tropes, giving them a new and powerful turn. I really recommend it.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. Another in the spate of recent novels and short stories using H.P. Lovecraft's monsters and settings but with the explicit goal of subverting his racism. Can it possibly be as good as The Ballad of Black Tom? Probably not, but I'm enjoying it anyway.
The Girl from Rawblood by Catriona Ward. The Villarca family has lived in Rawblood, a great Gothic mansion isolated in the bogs and mists of Dartmoor, for generations untold. The Villarcas are also haunted by… something. Exactly what it is depends on which generation of the Villarcas you ask: the ghost of a murdered woman, a curse, a predisposition to madness with episodes brought on by strong emotions, an autoimmune disease, a tendency to sicken and pine if they move away from the house of Rawblood, a history of murdering those they love.
The story is told in segments from different slices of the family's history, though at every moment the characters think they are the last of the bloodline, not realizing the reader has already met their descendants. In 1910 we have Iris Villarca, a young girl living alone with her father and Tom Gilmore, the stableboy she is closer to than she should be. As she grows older a series of tragedies condemn her to an insane asylum, where she rots in the care of doctors more concerned with the larger devastation of World War I than with her. In 1881, Alonso Villarca is determined to solve his family’s problems through medical science, a goal that drives him to experiments involving vivisection, opium, blood, and a notable lack of ethics. In 1839, Mary Hopewell fades away from consumption in Italy, living on an independence that just barely keeps her above poverty. She doesn’t know, of course, that she will soon meet Don Villarca, who will marry her and buy back her long-lost childhood home of Rawblood. There are other narrators too: Meg (someday to become Iris’s mother but when we meet her enduring a childhood raised by strangers and believing herself to have the powers of a witch), Charles Danforth (Alonso’s companion in medical experiments, who sees the ghost Alonso swears isn’t there), Tom Gilmore’s letters from the trenches, and nameless Villarcas back into the dark depths of history, medieval monks and tattooed pagans. All of these stories interrupt and influence one another, circling around family secrets and unavoidable consequences and the connections across generations. The future and the past become indistinguishable, and by the end of the book time has circled back on itself.
For all the obvious horror tropes – a haunted house! a ghost! a witch! – I wouldn’t really call this a horror novel. It’s not particularly interested in scaring the reader. Instead, more than anything, it’s a tragedy. And a tragedy in quite the classical sense: you’re told right at the beginning how it’s all going to end painfully, and yet the characters keep making the choices you know they have to make, setting the plot on unbending tracks toward the inevitable crash. There’s a bit of a mystery in figuring out what exactly haunts the Villarcas, but the central pull of the book isn’t in solving those clues (though I do have to say that I absolutely love the ultimate reveal), but simply in the loss and sadness of their downfall, and Iris’s in particular. Her loneliness, her trauma, the way she is both abandoned to her fate and the creator of that same fate – ah, it’s great.
I absolutely loved this book. It has a very Victorian feel in some ways – the setting, the ruin of a noble house, the situations of the characters – but the author has set very modern eyes on these old tropes, giving them a new and powerful turn. I really recommend it.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. Another in the spate of recent novels and short stories using H.P. Lovecraft's monsters and settings but with the explicit goal of subverting his racism. Can it possibly be as good as The Ballad of Black Tom? Probably not, but I'm enjoying it anyway.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-11 11:12 pm (UTC)I heard about this a couple of years ago under the title Rawblood! It sounded then like something I would like and your review only sounds more so. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2017-11-03 07:27 pm (UTC)I think you would like it! There are definitely certain things about it that remind me of your own writing.